Here’s the latest instalment of Digital Marketing Reads, a roundup of some of the more interesting articles we’ve read lately in the digital marketing world.
Google won’t index sites that do not work on mobile devices after July 5
We’ve known for a long time the importance of making websites mobile-friendly. With mobile phones now being the device that the majority of Google searches are done on, it would be a massive oversight *not* to optimise a site for mobile.
It looks like Google is finally getting serious about mobile because they’ve announced that after the 5th of July 2024, they will no longer be indexing sites that don’t work on mobile devices.
Note that they said “don’t work”, not “don’t look good”. So as long as a website exists and loads when viewed on a mobile device, it will still be indexed by Google. Still, if you need help getting your website to look great on mobile, you should definitely reach out to our Mildura web design and SEO experts and we’ll help you out!
The Rise Of Reddit: How You Can Leverage The Platform That’s Revolutionizing Search
You may have noticed in recent months that Reddit threads are appearing more frequently in Google searches. Nope, this isn’t random: in fact, it has a lot to do with the fact that Google paid Reddit $60M to access its content and use it for search and AI purposes.
It follows, then, that getting your brand or business more visibility across various Subreddit forums would aid in getting your website more clicks from Google searches.
How do you do this? Well conveniently enough, Search Engine Journal are hosting a live presentation on June 12 that will outline how to best go about engaging with communities on Reddit without being too spammy with your self-promotion. You can register for the event here.
Google AI Overviews visibility drops, only shows for 15% of queries
With all the Google updates that have happened in the past year, you may have noticed the presence of AI at the top of some search results (called AI Overviews). That would be Google’s AI attempting to answer your search query without you needing to scroll any further down the page or click on any of the resulting pages. At one point, AI Overviews appeared 84% of the time.
Well, it seems they have some fine tuning to do with their AI because there have been numerous occasions where the answers it provides are… not quite right. This article cites that there have been heaps of incorrect AI-generated responses, including advising people to “drink urine to eat rocks” (whatever that means).
As a result of the backlash and blunders, AI Overviews now only appear 15% of the time in Google search results. We expect this number to rise as Google fine tunes their AI and improves the quality of the responses it provides.